The average large grocery market or big box store has tens of thousands of products stocked and salable at any given point. There are very few companies and organizations that track customer preference data using actual purchases across different retailers, from which the efficacy of any packaging, display, and/or marketing efforts within any particular retail location can be evaluated. Tracking this data is typically gathered using UPC bar-code scanners distributed to selected consumers, who then upload the scanned data to a remote computer for analysis and sale to the manufacturers. Unfortunately, this method is highly unreliable as consumers typically fail to scan all purchased items; fail to account for multiple purchases of the same item; fail to account for discounts, coupons, and rebates; and often fail to reliably transmit the partially acquired data to the remote computer. Moreover, in consideration for the efforts of the consumer to assist in the market analysis, they are typically compensated both too little and too late, further increasing the lack of reliability of their acquired data because the consumer has little incentive to scan-in products from each and every shopping trip. Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a system and method for automatically acquiring, analyzing, distributing, and managing such consumer panel data or consumer scan panel data. This invention provides such a new and useful system and method.